I’m happy to announce that my twentieth book, Atmospheres 2, is now available on on Rumored Books.

TL;DR:

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Atmospheres 2 is an experimental novel about living in the chaos of a world where reality has become impossible to separate from the machinery that creates it. It’s a panorama of anxiety and existential dread set in a chaotic place where corporations and politics have become intertwined to the point of absurdity. The three acts of the book follow an unnamed character simply called Your Trusty Narrator, as he stumbles through an alienated life of corporate underemployment and altered reality. He struggles on a Sisyphean journey to find meaning in an existence that is quickly collapsing on itself, wondering if he’s the only person who notices.

This book is a sequel to my 2014 book Atmospheres, although it’s not a direct sequel with the same cast of characters, continuing the last book like a Spider-Man movie. It’s the same world, some of the same settings, the same general tone and philosophy. It’s also made of 100 segments arranged in three acts, alternating between first-person and third-person. But it’s more than twice as long (544 pages versus the original’s 242 pages), and I think the writing is a bit more dense, so there’s a lot going on. I think many readers will think the book is entirely plotless, but in some ways, it has a stronger underlying plot than most everything else I’ve written.

I’d like to think I write fiction, but I don’t even know at this point. It’s hard to be an absurdist when the actual news is far more ludicrous than anything I could write. This book is more political than anything I’ve done before, but it’s not a politics book. It captures a lot of the Kafkaesque inanity and dread about having politics devolve into a fully corporate swindle. But I think the main theme here is dancing around the larger question of identity a world where attention, self-identity, and reality has been completely strip-mined for monetization.

I started this book in 2014, and struggled for years to land it. It’s very much a “kitchen sink” book like Atmospheres and Rumored to Exist are, but I think it’s a distinctly different thing. It’s always a challenge to throw tons of everything into a manuscript and then try to arrange it with a through line, make everything jam with everything else. Coming up with the strategy of the whole thing and sticking to it was the hardest part to turn around, but like its predecessor, a lot of this is focused on the tactical level of having each segment be its own thing. I think a lot of people didn’t read Atmospheres straight through, but would open it to a random page and read one or two segments and enjoy them. I’m doing the same thing here, but it’s also something that someone invested in the book could read from 0 to 100 as a novel.

No, I did not use AI to write the book. I think I got a full manuscript done maybe five years before GPT-2 was even announced. I have a lot more to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post.

This is the longest I’ve ever worked on a single manuscript. It was interrupted by a lot of things: a pandemic, two graduate degrees, nine other books, two broken arms, and everything else in life. I keep a journal of notes in each book I write, and the one in this book is absolute madness. 24 hours of writing in Singapore, thousands of words of notes taken at the Ho Chi Minh airport, a bunch of editorial changes done while in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There’s a lot more to say about the general history of this book and how it radically changed over the years. Something else to write about later.

Anyway, the book’s out. Hope you get a chance to check it out.

Been busy writing. I think I mentioned this when I re-released Atmospheres, but I’ve been mad at work trying to finish Atmospheres 2. It’s close. I thought I’d be done by the end of the month, but I have been saying that for a year now, and this book has been going since 2014.

This is always the hardest part of a book for me. Every book is different, but there are about three distinct phrases in a book project, and it goes something like this:

First, there’s the initial struggle of getting something going. Maybe there’s a spark of an idea. Maybe there’s a rough outline or game plan. Maybe there’s just a bunch of junk left over from another project or from journals and freewrites. I seldom start with a title and a pitch and work downhill from there, but that’s happened too. But the first third of the book is basically going from nothing to crawling to just about walking. And it’s a huge struggle, because I really have to shut off any outside influence and not get distracted and don’t watch some dumb movie that gets in my craw and makes me think, “Hey, maybe this book should be set in 17th-century Russia” or whatever the hell would immediately derail the work and basically knock me back to zero. I don’t like this part of the project because it’s where I have the most self-doubt as a writer, and it’s where I’m most easily distracted.

The middle part of the journey is either when I have a manuscript-sized corpus going and need to knock it into a flowing outlined book, or I have a great outline of a book and I have to build out the corpus until it’s manuscript-sized. My books are generally 50/50 between the two. For example, Statue of Limitations was a “collection” book, where I started throwing pieces in a manuscript, leftovers and zine articles and whatever else, and the (brief) middle part of the cycle was getting to 30 items and getting each item up to full length. But a book like Decision Paralysis had a full manuscript of almost 100,000 words maybe eight months before it was published; it just had no solid outline or through line that made a book a book.

There will often be a sustained period during the middle part of the book when I am On. That means there’s enough of the book going that I am thinking about it when I’m not working on it. The structure is self-sustaining and I don’t have to worry about foundation or plumbing or scope. I can just write. I’m not worried about getting started and I’m not thinking about how I’ll sell it or finish it. I’m just writing. Things will click and I will have more ideas than time. It’s not just that I reach flow state in a writing session; it’s that day after day, I am working on this book. It’s a mission. That is the best part of the book. And it can be months or years before anyone even sees the book, which is possibly the most frustrating part of being a writer. But, if I had immediate feedback, it may be too much of a distraction for me to keep going.

At a certain point, the manuscript is at full length, and I’m close to or at the point when it’s “feature complete” and the blank parts no longer say ”>> TODO” and the book is almost a book. And that’s part three. And it’s the most frustrating part, because that’s when all the work that isn’t writing has to happen. And I absolutely hate all of this.

One thing: because of how I write and what I write, and because of my propensity to do these collection things, I can sometimes get deep into part three and not have a title yet. I’ve actually had books like Thunderbird that literally did not have a name until a week before publication. That also presents a problem with cover art, as well as the fact that I often write very abstract books. If I did a murder mystery where Colonel Mustard was holding a candlestick as a weapon, that’s easy enough to give to an artist and make a cover. But I’m not doing that. So there’s a great deal of panic from that.

Book descriptions are also an issue. When I wrote The Memory Hunter, I actually started with a description. A book like Atmospheres - well it’s pretty difficult to explain. I’m not a marketer, and I don’t write to sell books. I write because I have to. So the whole selling and pimping and making the rounds and talking about what key demographic is targeted by my product, I do not care about any of that. And if I think about it too much, I stop writing. It’s self-defeating. The only way I can finish a book is to shut that down completely.

And that’s where I am now. I started this book in 2014. It’s been very on and off since then. I’ll get into the start of part two of the journey, and suddenly think the book needs a redemption plot or a vaporwave angle or a bunch of nostalgic bits or… whatever. I get way too into my head, and start pitching myself ideas that aren’t applicable, and it’s like throwing a pipe wrench into a spinning jet engine.

This book is huge, and it’s very dense. It will be my second-longest book, probably 50% longer than my last big book. (And yeah, writing a book this size when the world has zero attention span and can’t pay attention through a six-second video clip is another problem.) I think since early last summer, I thought the book was about a month away from completion. Now that it’s August, I still do. I finished a draft and a copyedit a few weeks ago, started the layout, and realized it needed another last pass. It’s hard to edit a book this size, because it’s impossible to keep it all in your head at once. And even if I decided to just really quickly read like 20 pages a day, well that’s a month of work. But I have to get it right.

(And I know a publisher is supposed to help do all of this. And I know AI could simplify this. If you’re suggesting either, you must be new here.)

Anyway, stay tuned.